Chocks away! Wing walk brings Anna's fundraising target in sight

25 May 2017

Intrepid PCRF supporter, Anna Gomori-Woodcock, is a whisker away from reaching her fundraising target of £50,000, after completing a breath-taking wing walk in the skies above Essex.

Anna, 46, from Coton in Cambridgeshire, has been relentlessly fundraising for Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund since 2011, in memory of her mother, Gudrun, who died in 2006 a few weeks after she was diagnosed with the disease, aged just 66.

Joined by her friend Helena Kim, the two women took turns in being strapped onto the top of a Stearman biplane at Damyns Hall Aerodrome in Upminster, climbing to heights of 500ft and flying at speeds of up to 130 mph.

Together, they raised £4,260, taking Anna’s overall fundraising total to just over £47,400 – just shy of her target amount, which she intends to achieve by the end of the year.

“I was incredibly nervous when walking up to the bi-plane, but once I was in the sky I was overcome with a strange sense of calm,” says Anna. “Then excitement kicked in – you can see this really clearly in the video! It was just an incredible experience, truly breath-taking, and I didn’t want it to end. It was everything I hoped for and more.”

“I was also really proud of Helena – she’d agreed to do this with me before she even knew what a wing walk was! Luckily she didn’t back out when she found out what was involved!”

Since 2011, Anna has organised dozens of events to help her towards the £50k target she set herself. As well as holding regular discos and zumbathons in her local village, she has also completed several major personal challenges, including swimming the channel in a relay team just a few years after she learned the front crawl, and overcoming her fear of heights to complete a skydive. Her commitment is clearly infectious, as in 2013, she organised a group of family and friends to climb Ben Nevis and in 2016, conquered the Yorkshire Three Peaks with eight other families from her village.

She says the wing walk may be her final ‘big’personal challenge, but Anna’s well-known for her ‘never say never’ attitude. She says: “After the skydive, my dad, who’s 83, tried to make me promise to take on less adventurous challenges, but I couldn’t. It’s a good job, because as soon as I heard about Aerobatic Tactics offering wing walks to the public, I knew immediately that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t tell Dad about it until the last minute!”